Is online education really free? [closed]

Question

Hi i am from a developing country but for some reasons can't reach the university for now and i want to know if i really can have access to (let's say) a developed country grade education (solid bases) :

• Is following a curriculum from a university a good way to achieve my goals?
• If the answer to question one yes i tried to follow the curriculum to have a well rounded knowledge but don't find the resources to study the said topics(for example i tried to learn civil engineering from Auburn university i don't seek to become a civil enginner just want to have somewhat a deep look) but i get only the name of the courses with their number but when searching for them online i find nothing useful, how should i proceeds?
• I already learned some programming and find the ecosystem open and free? is it the same for other branches of science (apart from computer science)?

Answer 1

It's certainly not always free.

Rules vary around the world. Here in the US, there is usually no requirement that course materials be made publicly available. The instructor is generally allowed to publicly post any materials that they created themselves, if they wish to do so, but if they used copyrighted third-party materials like textbooks, then they cannot post those.

These days most US universities use learning management systems (Canvas, Blackboard, etc), and by default they restrict access to students who are registered (= paying tuition fees) for that particular course. If the instructor wants to make something public, it requires extra steps.

In some cases, the university may have a policy of encouraging faculty to make materials available, perhaps providing support or incentives for them to do so. MIT OpenCourseWare is a notable example. But even there I don't think it's strictly mandatory.

So in general, you can't assume that every course in the world will have materials that you can access. You'll have to look around to find materials that you find suitable. And of course, their quality can vary, and it will be up to you to evaluate that.

And even when you do find good materials to study on your own, you may end up learning the material well, but you won't get any instructor feedback on your work, nor any grade or other evaluation of how well you learned, nor any official credential such as a degree. Those do require actually enrolling with the university, and paying whatever tuition fees they might happen to charge.

Answer 2

This is from the perspective of someone who mainly studies' through the internet.

Is online education really free?

In theory, yes but in practice no. You pay for the online education by paying for the device you access material on, the internet and finally with the time you spend going over the material.

If the answer to question one yes i tried to follow the curriculum to have a well rounded knowledge but don't find the resources to study the said topics(for example i tried to learn civil engineering from Auburn university i don't seek to become a civil engineer just want to have somewhat a deep look) but i get only the name of the courses with their number but when searching for them online i find nothing useful, how should I proceeds?

The trick is to find a textbook. Just search any introductory civil engineering textbook and study from that, the part you do get stuck, just check other places. There are of course MIT OCWs, but I feel that they show limited information at times which would otherwise be standard in a textbook.

In my opinion I think if you are outside of a university, then the idea of confining yourself to a course/course material is pointless. A textbook and course may give you direction, but don't try to take more from it then that. If you don't get certain part from a book or a course, then just check something else. Don't force yourself to understand specifically from that place.

Answer 3

There are well-known universities, companies, and non-profit organizations that have made large efforts to make large amounts of university-level educational content available for free.

Examples include MIT OpenCourseWare and Khan Academy. There are undoubtedly many others you can find with a google search.

That means that it should not be difficult to find free and reasonably high quality content for most mainstream undergraduate education topics. For more specialized topics it will be more hit or miss. For some topics you may get lucky and find good content some professor was kind enough to make available, for others you won’t.

The main problem has to do with your first question:

Is following a curriculum from a university a good way to achieve my goals?

Well, we don’t know what your goals are exactly. If your goals are getting a university degree, one big problem is getting someone to certify the knowledge you’re acquiring via tests and other assessments, and eventually award you a diploma. That’s usually not free.

And another big problem is that even if you just want the university education rather than a degree, most people don’t have the discipline and other skills required to study all the material for a college degree on their own even if it is available. A true university education consists of more than a one-way consumption of knowledge (even very high quality knowledge), but rather is a two-way interaction in which you go to a campus, sit in lectures, ask questions, talk to your peers, and do many other things that involve interacting with your fellow students and with the teaching faculty, all of which facilitate the learning process. A university is like a very large positive feedback loop in which thousands of students and professors all reinforce each other’s motivation and intellectual progress. By consuming all the material online on free education platforms, you will miss out on this very significant aspect of what a university education is about.

That being said, the education platforms are used by millions of people who find them beneficial. They’re quite good in lots of ways, and certainly are infinitely better than getting no education at all. And some people - I would say a very small fraction of people - are autodidacts who truly have the ability to learn difficult material entirely on their own with no feedback from others. Those rare individuals can probably get as much benefit from studying free online content as from attending university in person.